Cloth Diapering, Decoded

Making Cloth Diapering Work for YOU

I’ll be honest here: I can see why some parents prefer disposables. They may be expensive and wasteful, but boy oh boy are they EASY. Pull off a poopy diaper, toss it in the bin, never think about it again. With cloth, things can get a little bit more hands on, and it’s important to figure out how to make that work for your household!

Diaper Service

This kind of offsets the cost-saving benefits of cloth diapering, but if you have it in your budget, I can’t say enough good things about a diaper service! My incredibly generous mother gave us a year of service as a shower gift, and it’s been a huge help.

Our diaper service provides fitted liners and cloth wipes. Twice a week we set out a bag of dirty diaps and wipes at night, and in the morning there is a bag of clean ones waiting for us. No rinsing, no extra laundry! The only things our service doesn’t provide are the covers, so we picked up a bunch of the adjustable hybrid Grovia covers, which should last us until baby Darrol is potty training.

DIY

If you’re on a tight budget, washing the cloth diapers at home is your best bet. How often you’re washing depends on a lot of things. If your baby is breastfed, you’re going to be doing more washes, because breastfed babies poop more than formula fed babies.

You’ll need a wet bag to store dirty diapers, and if you’re dealing with a pee pee diaper, you can just toss it right into the bag. For poopy diapers, you’ll want to rinse them a little before bagging them up. You can rinse in the sink or tub. You can also do like a couple of my friends and get a hose attachment for the toilet, so you can rinse that poop into the toilet and flush it.

Keep experimenting with setups until you find one that works best – every family is different, and finding the cloth diapering situation that works best for you might take some time.

I’d love to hear from the other cloth diapering moms and dads out there! What snags did you run into when you first got started, and what’s working well for your family?

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Becky Striepe is a freelance writer and vegan crafter living in Atlanta, Georgia. Her life’s mission is to make green crafting and vegan food accessible to everyone!
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this was so helpful you have NO IDEA! We did disposables with my son, but have decided to do cltoh diapers this go round. I like the cover you have! I have 6 covers and 60 prefolds right now. i would like to at least try the insert on the video, sounds awesome. We have the bucket and liner, the stretchy fasteners, the wet bag and more. I am so excited to do this instead.

Lots of new ideas since my kids were in diapers. I used the plain old diapers with plastic pants. Was pretty easy really, Just an additional washer load every other day or so. My kids had terrible skin reactions from disposable diapers, so we were much happier with cloth diapers.

I am considering using cloth diapers for my eighth child on the way. I have tried them, and had ups and downs, used disposable ones for convenience and I sure wish I could get a service. Since my budget is small , the tub and washer are my handy dandy tools. I can see as baby grows I will have to make decisions about how to handle it when we go out...that was always a disaster for me, wet clothes, soaked or poopy smelling and then that makes for more laundry. I think I like the disposable for long outings and prefer the cloth around the homestead and outside. I do not like the idea of adding more to landfills and I try to minimize my usage. Right now, I am potty training my son who is two to Pee and he is doing great! Any suggestions about the transition to pooping in the toilet? Thanks for the article and I will get on to sewing my own diapers again, it is fun to do these things before the baby is born!
Aloha!